Using Full Keyboard Access in conjunction with VoiceOver can cause issues with VoiceOver focus

Category
Miscellaneous
Severity
Serious

Description

If you enable both VoiceOver and Full Keyboard Access, you may find that VoiceOver focus will be inconsistent and unreliable in some situations. Typically this may result in you not being able to move VoiceOver focus by flicking or focus spontaneously jumping between UI elements.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Ensure that VoiceOver is enabled.
  2. In Settings > Accessibility > Keyboards, ensure that Full Keyboard Access is enabled.
  3. Open Safari and place VoiceOver focus in to the address field.
  4. Flick right with 1 finger.

You would expect VoiceOver focus to move from the address field to the next UI element.

What actually happens is that focus remains in the address field.

Another example of this issue can be found by opening the App Store app; navigating to the Today tab; double-tapping with 1 finger on the My Account button; and then double-tapping with 1 finger on your name. The resulting page is impossible to navigate by flicking.

Bug First Encountered

iOS/iPadOS 14.0

Device(s) bug has been encountered on

iPhone

How often the bug occurs

Sometimes

Apple feedback #

FB8916800

Status

Fixed

Fixed In

iOS/iPadOS 15.0

Options

Comments

By WellF

3 years 3 months ago

I thought this one was solved in iOS 14. Full keyboard Access has some potential.

By David Goodwin

3 years 3 months ago

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

In reply to by WellF

I *think* that there have actually been two separate (but possibly related) bugs which have been responsible for issues with VoiceOver focus in iOS 14.

I say this because I've never had Full Keyboard Access enabled, but did experience significant issues with VoiceOver focus in the 14.0 release. However, as with many others, this was resolved in iOS 14.1.

I couldn't explain why some people were still experiencing issues with VoiceOver focus after 14.1 was released, so the discovery of this conflict of settings is now hopefully the explanation and most people will have a use case that allows them to disable Full Keyboard Access.

By Travis Roth

3 years 3 months ago

Does full keyboard access officially or technically work with VoiceOver? I have not been able to get full keyboard access to do anything on an iPad with an external keyboard. Perhaps I missed something?...